As far as coming up with passwords, I use a phrase like BSDfan666 above, use the first letter of each word in alternating case, and mix in a few random special characters and throw in non-random numbers (the numbers are word and/or letter counts based on position in the password). Generally the first few days I stare blankly at the screen while reciting the phrase in my head and counting words and letters to re-build the password, but after a while like anything else it becomes muscle memory.
I used to use keepass on my thumb drive, but a while back I switched to pwman instead. It keeps your passwords in a gpg-encrypted db in your home dir
Way too many passwords of varying complexity to remember for work.